22Slides

Over the last few months, the name of our game has been refinement: We launched a new home page at 22Slides.com that features a more polished look at feel, reminiscent of the classic European photographic equipment we draw much of our inspiration from, as well as made tons of small improvements throughout our system, some of which are listed below:

Websites

• Added the ability to remove “22” logo from websites, to allow a completely custom look
• Added support for HTTP redirects
• Added support for our download blocker add-on to sites’ home pages
• Improved current page indicators and URLs when using custom home pages
• Improved referral spam blocking
• Added classes to different types of Tumblr blog posts to allow unique styling for each type of content
• Fixed numeric alphabetization of files in the Dropbox file manager add-on
• Improved small alignments of default skin in areas
• Added {year} variable to copyright notices, to allow custom copyright notices that automatically update with the current year

Control Panel

• New WYSIWYG text editor to allow text to be formatted without the need for Markdown
• Increased image upload limit from 23MP to 25MP to better accommodate more common full-resolution images
• Revamped page creation process, eliminating some steps to make the process faster
• Fixed thumbnail cropping in latest versions of Google Chrome
• Added indicator that points out which page has just been created or edited
• Subtle design changes to help communicate which elements on different pages are editable
• Changed language on payment page to be more clear for European areas
• Made “changes saved” feedback notification more visible
• Fixed page naming issue that would sometime add a “-1” to the end of a page’s URL when it wasn’t necessary

Mobile Sites

• Enabled mobile site add-on by default
• Moved mobile navigation button to the right, to better-accommodate one-hand use with today’s larger phones
• Improved appearance of “blurbs” in the navigation
• Removed arrows from navigation items that aren’t drop down menus, to reduce clutter
• Added support for custom copyright notices in the footer

If you’ve ever been concerned about losing valuable search engine placement when reorganizing your website, renaming pages, or even when switching to 22Slides from another website service, we just introduced the ability to remedy this by creating permanent 301 HTTP redirects.

For example, if you have a popular page on your site at the address “portfolio-ii” and you’d like to rename it to something like “portraits”, now you can create a redirect from the old address to the new one and retain all your search engine points.

Also, if you’re switching to 22Slides from another service, you don’t need to worry about losing your most valuable pages’ search engine value. You can simply create redirects from the old URLs to the new ones.

We’ve joined Instagram! Follow us at @22slides.

We’ll be using the account less for announcing things to do with 22Slides itself, but rather to feature some of the great work our customers do.

If you’re a client of ours and would like us to feature some of your work, just let us know, or tag your photos with “#22slides”.

Today we made a big decision about a very small feature: We added the ability to remove the 22Slides branding from our websites.

Since the beginning, we’ve relied quite heavily on this little logo to get new clients, so removing it is a big deal to us. Cutting out a major source of leads isn’t exactly a typical business practice, but we feel it is something that our existing clients will appreciate (and we think it’s more important to cater to our existing clients than chase new ones).

The option can be found toward the bottom of your “Settings” page in your control panel. Enjoy!

We’ve just replaced our old Markdown editor with a new WYSIWYG editor for text pages that will make formatting your text, changing styles, alignment, adding links, contact forms, etc much easier.

Along with this change comes a few more smaller refinements as well, like a redesigned UI for changing a text page’s layout, automatic email obfuscation (to help defend against spammers), and helpers for adding images and video to your text pages too.

We all know how convenient automatic online payments can be. You setup your card info just once and never have to worry about it again!

Except when that card you’ve been using expires. Updating your card info with every vendor/service/website that uses it can be a major pain.

To remedy this, banks are rolling out a new feature that automatically sends your new card info to vendors that have your old card info, which means your credit card details will always be up-to-date without you having to lift a finger.

22Slides just added support for this last week, so from now on, you won’t have to worry about updating an expired payment card with our service.

The presentation of your work on mobile devices is more important than ever, which is why we do our best to allow your website to do your work justice, no matter what medium your viewers favor, and why we continue to make improvements whenever possible.

We recently made some changes to our mobile site add-on, refining the footer area to make things appear more light-weight and shift more focus to your work.

We’ve also made improvements to the way sites are displayed on tablets, specifically sites with sidebar layouts. Now, the sidebar stays put just like it does when viewing on a desktop computer, instead of scrolling out of view with the content, creating a much more consistent experience across devices.

We realize it’s a lot of work to organize a new portfolio. Going through old catalogs, cleaning up images, deciding how things should be organized and how the website should look all take time, and sometimes 14 days to do so just isn’t enough.

So we’re changing our trial period from the ever-so-common 14 days to a full 30 days to give people more time to see if 22Slides is right for them.

Images you upload to your website can now keep their original file name, instead of being automatically renamed.

This provides several benefits, primarily including better performance in search engine results:

Since search engines can’t see and understand a photograph, they rely mainly its file name to describe what’s in the photo. When the file name provides no useful info (like just being named “image”), search engines don’t know what’s in it. But if the file were named something like “smith-wedding-2014.jpg”, they’ll associate the keywords “smith”, “wedding”, and “2014” with the image, and start displaying the image in related search results.

Overall, this is a somewhat minor change, and something your visitors will likely never notice, but will help your work get more attention as part of our ongoing effort to give our clients the most effective websites possible.

We’ve made some big improvements to our “Tiles” layout!

Now each thumbnail scales with the size of the screen, and automatically adjusts the number of columns in the layout to ensure your images are being displayed as large as possible, while still maintaining even spacing on all sides of the page. Resize your browser window when viewing a gallery to check it out!

Also, each thumbnail loads much faster. Before, the page had to wait to load all the thumbnails before any of them could be displayed. Now, each thumbnail is shows as soon as it’s loaded, making your site feel snappier than ever!